The Windows Vista Battery Saver utility will turn off Aero and/or the Windows Sidebar when on battery, or only when battery life is low. The author claims it saves 30% of your battery life, but the Windows Vista Blog says only 1-4%, so your mileage may vary.

Once installed, there’s a small icon in the system tray that will bring up the following settings dialog:

If you are wondering why the screenshot is so blurry, it’s because the fonts on the dialog were actually blurry on my screen for some reason. (no idea why).

Personally, this utility seems like it would be useful only for using the “Deactivate when battery level is less then …” Once your battery life is down to critical levels, it’s probably helpful to turn off anything that could cause extra processor cycles, and the sidebar is a good candidate for that.

Download Windows Vista Battery Saver from Just Code

In Microsoft Word, you can preview the document list within Word without having to open the document. This tip is very useful, if you have many word files and are not sure which file contain the information that you need. Almost all versions of Word support this feature to view all word file as preview one by one.

Follow the given steps to preview the word document without having to open the document:

First click on Start button, go to Program then click on Microsoft Word to run the word application.

Now go to File menu and click on Open option to open any word file. Here a small dialog will appear with title “Open”.

Now on the right hand side of the toolbar click the down arrow on Views and choose Preview.

This will open the preview pane. Click on any file on the left hand side and preview what inside the file. When you find the file you need just click Open button to open the file.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Friday the world’s biggest software maker might introduce the next update to its Windows operating system in 2009.

"The next version is supposed to be Windows 7," Gates said at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in Miami. "That will be sometime in the next year or so that we’ll have a new version."

Windows 7 (formerly known as Blackcomb and Vienna) is the working name for the next major version of Microsoft Windows as the successor to Windows Vista. Microsoft has announced that it is “scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe”, and that “the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar. “Windows 7 is expected to be released by 2009 or near January 2010. The client versions of Windows 7 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. A server variant, codenamed Windows Server 7, is also under development.

Read more information about Windows 7 here and here.

If you’ve upgraded to Vista and added 4GB of RAM, you might be wondering why your computer is only reporting 3.5GB of RAM. This is the limit of a 32bit operating system, the only real solution to this problem is to use a Vista 64bit edition, although Coding Horror has a great post on why this is happening, and where exactly that extra half a GB of memory has gone to…

Addressing more than 4 GB of memory is possible in a 32-bit operating system, but it takes nasty hardware hacks like 36-bit PAE extensions in the CPU, together with nasty software hacks like the AWE API. Unless the application is specifically coded to be take advantage of these hacks, it’s confined to 4 GB. Well, actually, it’s stuck with even less– 2 GB or 3 GB of virtual address space, at least on Windows.

OK, so we’re limited to 4,096 megabytes of virtual address space on a 32-bit operating system. Could be worse.* We could be back in 16-bit land, where the world ended at 64 kilobytes. Brr. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about segments, and pointers of the near and far variety. Let us never speak of this again.

But back to our mystery. Where, exactly, did the other 642 megabytes of my memory go?

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